The year is 2020, and the world has changed and continues to change, in many ways, some of the changes concern me, but in many ways, the changes are fantastic! I am personally most excited by the reinvention of the American Dream. The American Dream is no longer a job for life and homeownership; it’s our ability to take control of our destiny, our ability to expect more and accept less. While there are many powerful lessons to be learned from the assimilation and stoicism of the silent generation, it is our desire to blaze the trail and our willingness to fail that has shifted energy from assimilation to creation, and this is fantastic! But make no mistake, in order to dominate thy destiny in a market with unprecedented opportunity, unprecedented new entrants, and unprecedented velocity we will need to have unprecedented focus, discipline, and ability. Doing the ‘job’ is no longer enough because being a creator requires inspiration that transcends the work, our destiny will be determined by our desire and ability to envision the future and our commitment to making it so.
I was on a flight back from AWS re:Invent 2019 (LAS => EWR) in early December, and I had a thought, not the first time I had the idea, but the first time I realized how I might make the idea into something tangible that would allow me to support my thought process.
The thought goes something like this: While I am not independently monetarily wealthy, I’ve worked hard to construct a lifestyle that measures wealth in terms of what makes me happy and satisfied. My satisfaction and motivation are derived from mastery, purpose, and autonomy. It is this idea that got me to thinking about the type of environment that I need to be in to feel fulfilled as opposed to frustrated, and my ability to influence satisfaction. Fulfillment and satisfaction are complicated topics, and it’s easy to get frustrated. What we need to realize is that we have an immense amount of control over our fulfillment and satisfaction, but we also need to hold ourselves accountable. Then I started thinking about the work, and the fact that mastery, purpose, and autonomy drive me, and these are profoundly personal. Most who know me have heard me reference achieved versus ascribed status at least once or twice. I don’t believe in ascribed status, in fact, it is one of the things in life that frustrates me the most. I believe that I was put here on earth to work hard, to build knowledge, to consider context, to apply logic and reason to decision making, to expect more of myself and others, and to challenge everything that I cannot rationalize. There are no sacred cows grazing in my pasture! The shift from achieved to ascribed status is an easy one, and it can be a dangerous shift, it is at this point that our drive and our influence are in decline. I then asked myself, what do I respect? Hypothetically speaking, if I were to go out and interview tomorrow, what sort of organization and culture would fulfill me versus frustrate me. I then started to think that fulfillment and satisfaction are hard when those around you don’t look at mastery, purpose, and autonomy in the same way you view these satisfaction hygiene factors.
So I started pondering, what if I could create a simple gate that would quickly identify if a prospective culture was the right or the wrong culture, a culture that would embrace my profession as a spiritual calling, not a paycheck. These ideas frame how I think about my mission in life, my vision of how I can continue to push myself, the values I hold dear that I hope to instill in my children, but they also influence my expectations.
Say hello to version 1 of the CV API.
curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer Gj4TUbT209T0YEbmxwSZ9MgdC7AtRr6D" http://cv.bocchinfuso.net/app/api/v1.0/cvRead the full API documentation.
So as of today, if you want to review my CV (curriculum vitae, aka resume), make a REST call to my CV API. Can’t make a REST call to my API, don’t want to discuss how I built the API, my CI/CD process, etc. then we would likely spend our days together frustrated, unsatisfied and unfulfilled, so this is probably not a fit. It’s 2020, as employers, we should desire to interview less and to be questioned more by those looking to join a team and a culture that satisfies and fulfills them. It’s an individual’s desire for mastery, purpose and autonomy and our ability to nurture these individuals that will satisfy them and create organizational success that others will look at in awe!
Go ahead and give the CV API a try, and if you find yourself interviewing with me (or presenting at my kickoff meeting), make it different, challenge me, make me uncomfortable, make me leave the interview feeling like I am a worthless piece of matter that lacks mastery and purpose.
Version 1 of the CV API only allows for REST GET requests. I am currently working on the ability to inquire via API with a REST POST request, where inquiries can be made programmatically and will notify me via Pushover, Telegram or Slack.
This post is not 100% complete, but with the 2020 Digital Innovation Kickoff fast approaching, I wanted to get it published and shared with my team so they could understand the thought I put into my 2020 Digital Innovation Kickoff Project. I am holding off on making my GitHub and Docker Hub repositories publicly visible because I want the team to do the research and build their app and DevOps pipeline. Before our kickoff on March 12, 2020, I will update this post to include links to my public GitHub and Docker Hub repositories as well as documentation on my build and deploy process.
In 1971 while at Xerox PARC Alan Key in response to managers wanting to know how to plan future products, stated that “The most reliable way to forecast the future is to invent it.” We have the ability to create our future, we have a responsibility to influence the future and we have accountability for what our tomorrow will look like.